spotagap
Austin, Texas has a grocery problem in a few specific places, and the data says so plainly. We ran our scoring engine against every hex-shaped catchment area across the metro (roughly 2,000 of them) and compared each one's grocery-store density to the metro's own average. The result: 495 locations come back underserved. Several of them have more than 15,000 people living within reach and not a single grocery store.
The metro-wide numbers
Austin averages 3.34 grocery stores per 10,000 residents across every catchment area where the population is dense enough to measure reliably. That's the benchmark every hex gets compared against, not a national average, not a guess, the real number for this metro's own grocery landscape.
| Verdict | Hexes | Share of scoreable area |
|---|---|---|
| Underserved (below half the metro average) | 495 | 48% |
| Adequately served | 286 | 28% |
| Saturated (well above average) | 244 | 24% |
Almost half the metro's measurable area is underserved for grocery. That's not evenly spread, some of it is low-density land that barely qualifies for scoring at all, but a meaningful chunk of it is real, populated neighborhoods.
Four real examples
Filtering down to catchments with at least 15,000 residents and zero grocery stores in reach turns up 59 real locations. Here are four, described by general area rather than an exact address, since these are hex-shaped catchments, not single storefronts:
- Northeast Austin, near the US-290/Manor Road corridor: about 15,700 residents, zero grocery stores in the catchment.
- East Austin, past I-35: roughly 17,000 residents, zero grocery stores in the catchment.
- South Austin, near Sunset Valley: about 19,700 residents, zero grocery stores in the catchment.
- North Austin, along the Parmer Lane corridor: nearly 22,000 residents, zero grocery stores in the catchment, the single largest population gap we found in this category.
None of this is a guess. Every number here comes from Foursquare and Overture's open business-location data, apportioned across the same hex grid the app uses for every city, compared against Census population for that same area. If a category isn't reliably measurable this way (thin data, or a business type people travel across town for rather than visit at the nearest one), the app says so instead of showing a number it can't back up. Grocery isn't one of those cases, it's exactly the kind of everyday, walk-to-the-nearest-one category this method is built for.